The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c17.23

c17.23

The empire of the great Kushāns came to an end when Vāsudeva was defeated by the Sasānians in the second quarter of the third century A.D., and therewith came also the destruction of the Buddhist monasteries throughout the North-West, evidence of which is furnished by the many small hoards of Vāsudeva's coins found there. They were buried beneath the floors of the monks' cells and not thereafter reclaimed by their owners. From this catastrophe dated also the virtual end of the Gandhāra School of sculpture for which there could henceforth have been little demand. Here and there, no doubt, Buddhist settlements still survived in a shrunken, moribund condition, and descendants of the old sculptors may occasionally have been commissioned to execute such carving as they were capable of. And for the first generation it may be presumed that the standard of their work was maintained at much the same level as it was at the time the monasteries were destroyed; but thereafter, from about A.D. 260 until the come-back of the Kidāra Kushāns four generations later, nothing seems to have been left of the old-time artistry and little of the old-time skill in craftsmanship. Two samples will suffice to make my meaning clear (figs. 150-1). Fig. 150 is a small panel which was purchased near Sahrī-Bahlol and is now in the Peshawar Museum. It is said to be of steatite and to have come from Afrido-Dherī. The subjects depicted are: above, the ‘Presentation of the four bowls’; below, the Death Scene (*Mahāparinirvāṇa*). Both follow the orthodox traditions,¹ but the workmanship is of the poorest kind. Obviously it is late and decadent, but it is the sort of relief that an incompetent craftsman might have turned out at any time after about A.D. 200. On the other hand, the decadence of fig. 151 is due less to the personal shortcomings of the sculptor than to the general decline of the period. We shall appreciate this if we compare fig. 151 with the other reliefs of the same scene—the Grand Miracle of Śrāvastī—illustrated in figs. 122-5. Even the latest and most decadent of these, fig. 123, is substantially less degenerate in style than fig. 151; and this is true not only of the general design, which in fig. 151 is almost geometric in its formality, but of the individual figures which are copies of conventional types without any trace of creative imagination.